A ‘Shocking’ Amount of the Web Is Already AI-Translated Trash, Scientists Determine::Researchers warn that most of the text we view online has been poorly translated into one or more languages—usually by a machine.
I recently was searching for some tips on overlanding routes. So many sites are just long strung together SEO word salad.
I’ve been saying for quite a while now that the Internet was best in the '90s and early 2000s back before it was commercialized, even despite all the “under construction” gifs and whatnot. The signal/noise ratio has only continued to drop since then.
Counterpoint: the Internet still exists as it did back then, but relatively smaller compared to what it’s become.
You just need to find the right people and content to interact with, which is harder now because there’s so much more garbage. I’d say they have grown in absolute numbers.
I get what you’re saying that '90s-style content is largely still there if you look for it, but this…
…which is harder now because there’s so much more garbage…
…has nevertheless destroyed the “Internet as it existed back then,” which was specifically an Internet where finding such content was easy.
You can find a lot of old school websites hosted on neocities, though a lot of them are more of an art project than an actual website.
It was always bad, it’s just now bad in a slightly different way. I’ve been online since 1994 and, yeah. If anything, it’s a bit easier to avoid malware and scams these days. Even websites from reputable sources were sketch as fuck back then, with seizure-inducing popups and a minefield of JavaScript malware with no real options for VPN or blocking ads.
It’s been getting steadily better over the past 10 years or so, and the AI nonsense is threatening to send us back to the early internet Wild West.
All we need now is for Microsoft to start including 30 very sketchy ‘demos’ and mandatory adware with Windows again and the nostalgia will be complete.
The internet is light years ahead today. What we need is anti-ai filters in our browser to keep our browsing clean of shitty AI nonsense, kinda like ad blocking plugins.
e: I’d do UX, usability, and some dev on such a plugin if anyone wants to do some dev, too.
More evidence for the Dead Internet Theory.
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts that the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content that is manipulated by algorithmic curation, marginalizing organic human activity. Proponents of the theory believe these bots are created intentionally to help manipulate algorithms and boost search results in order to ultimately manipulate consumers. Furthermore, some proponents of the theory accuse government agencies of using bots to manipulate public perception, stating “The U. S. government is engaging in an artificial intelligence powered gaslighting of the entire world population”.
Fucking ironic
Lol, read the room bot.
Good bot
I need an AI Firefox extension that detects badly translated AI text and automatically blocks those domains.
Thanks, scientists, couldn’t have known that without you.
There is value in verifying and quantifying opinion, even if your sure this opinion is true.
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Next up: scientists detect sarcasm.
No way.
For a time I thought this Fediverse thing would help or change things or something, but honestly…the Internet is just plain boring now…and it’s pretty clear what is causing that: AI / SEO trash content, social media’s rise, and commercialization of the Internet generally.
One day I was even feeling nostalgic so I went back to where I spent hours upon hours of my youth: EFNet on IRC…there was basically nobody there and of the few channels I saw some were even Trump-leaning weirdo “communities”.
It’s basically finished. I can’t even find a decent place to procrastinate or hang out anymore on this POS. It’s all just a giant ad surface and e-commerce portal. The fucking owners won.
The fucking owners won.
Always has been 🔫
That said, I would suggest smaller communities and private messaging. Find your niche and make it home.
EFNet is boomer shit. Most of IRC happens on other servers now, like LiberaChat, or on new protocols like Matrix.
We’re still here, we’re still alive
Turing tests solving turing tests solving turing tests
This isn’t shocking at all. The markets for obscure language content are incredibly small so there’s no incentive for most to spend resources on it. I’d argue mediocre machine translation is better than nothing at all in many cases, but for unsupervised training it does pose a challenge.
They didn’t only look at low-resource languages, they just started there because that was the problem domain. They found that 57% of ALL sentences on the Internet appeared to be machine translated, including translations into high-resource languages. The remaining 43% might also be machine generated, it just wasn’t found to be part of a multi-way parallel group.
Translation is very different from generation.
As a matter of fact, even AI generation has different grades of quality.
SEO garbage is certainly not the same as an article with AI generated components and very different from a translated article.
Too good not to be ruined by humanity
The whole webring idea needs to come back. Human curated recommendations of good resources and pages. So long as these pages remain in the control of humans and dedicated to curation and are decentralised, unlike the search engines, then they’ll be reliable.
Plugging in some social and community organisation, perhaps like a wiki, and you could get even more out of it.
There are modern webrings. Dang the yesterweb webring shut down, that was a really good one.
AI is going to fuck up everything we’ve ever done.
We fucked it up on our own with SEO long before chatgpt came along. Google has been going downhill for years as people learn to game the algorithm.
It will speed it along sure, but the core problem is that is profitable to dump garbage on the internet and put ads on it. The monitozation is the root of this.
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